Installing on
Windows Azure

Creating CentOS VMs

You will need to sign up for the Windows Azure Virtual Machines preview feature in order to create a virtual machine. You can also sign up for a free trial account if you do not have a Windows Azure account.

Create a virtual machine running CentOS Linux

In the Management Portal, at the bottom left of the web page, click “+New”, click “Virtual Machine”, and then click “From Gallery”.

Select a CentOS virtual machine image from “Platform Images”, and then click the next arrow at the bottom right of the page.

On the VM Configuration page, provide the following information:

Provide a “Virtual Machine Name”, such as “testlinuxvm”.

Specify a “New User Name”, such as “newuser”, which will be added to the Sudoers list file. Do NOT use the username “riak”, as it may conflict with the installation package.

In the “New Password” box, type a strong password.

In the “Confirm Password” box, retype the password.

Select the appropriate “Size” from the drop down list.

Click the next arrow to continue.

On the VM Mode page, provide the following information:

If this is the first node, select the “STANDALONE VIRTUAL MACHINE” radio button. Otherwise, select the “CONNECT TO EXISTING VIRTUAL MACHINE” radio button, and select the first node in the drop down list.

Install Riak and configure using a shell script

Configure Riak using Riak Control

You can either use Riak Control or the command line to add nodes to your Riak Cluster. If you wish to add nodes via the command line, skip down to the section entitled “Configure Riak using Command Line”

Find the dns name and “Deployment ID” in the virtual machine dashboard of the VM you created the https endpoint for. For Example:

Enter ‘admin’ as the username, and the “Deployment ID” as the password.

Select ‘Cluster’ on the left.

Add VMs which also have the Riak software installed and configured by entering riak@yourhostnamehere in the input box, and clicking ‘Add Node’. Use the short name of each vm, not the DNS name. For Example:

riak@basho-centos1

You now have a Riak cluster on Azure

Configure Riak using Command Line

If you have already followed the instructions in the section “Configure Riak using Riak Control”, skip this section.

First, SSH into the second (and subsequent nodes) and execute:

riak-admin cluster join riak@yourhostnamehere

(Where ‘yourhostnamehere’ is the short name of the first node in your cluster)

(NOTE: The host you choose can actually be any host that has already joined the cluster. The first host has no special significance, but it’s important not to attempt to join to a node that hasn’t joined a cluster yet. Doing this would create a second cluster; thus we use the first node for these instructions.)

After all the nodes have have been joined to the first node via the previous command, connect to any of the nodes via SSH or PuTTY and execute the following:

riak-admin cluster plan

Verify all the nodes are listed as expected. If the cluster plan looks good:

riak-admin cluster commit

To check the status of clustering use:

riak-admin member-status

You now have a Riak cluster on Azure

Load Test Data

Execute on any one of the nodes:

curl -s http://rekon.basho.com | sh

Visit DNS address listed on the dashboard, at the port we opened as an endpoint: